Textual (Paper) Records in the Washington, DC Area

About Our Services

The Textual Archives Services of the National Archives provides access
to the permanently valuable textual (paper) records of the Executive and
Judicial Branches of the Federal Government housed in the National Archives
Building in Washington DC (Archives I) and the National Archives at College
Park, Maryland (Archives II). We make original records
available to researchers in the research rooms, provide information about
the records for users, and make reproductions of records for a fee.

About the Records

The textual holdings of both Archives I and Archives II encompass very broad
spans of records of many government agencies, and researchers need to keep
this in mind when requesting material from the National Archives.

The records housed in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, include
U.S. Supreme Court records; pre-WWII military including military service
and pension files from the Revolution to the Spanish American War; New Deal
agency records; naval and maritime including pre-World War II Navy and Coast
Guard records; records relating to Native Americans and public lands, Immigration
and Naturalization Service records; Census records; and a variety of smaller
groups of records.

The records in the National Archives at College Park include those of the
Departments of State, Justice, Treasury, Interior, Labor, Commerce, Energy,
Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Health and Human Services,
and Transportation. Other records at Archives II include post-1940 records
of military agencies, and records of various independent agencies and the
Executive Office of the President, including the National Security Council.
A special access staff at Archives II provides reference service on records
of the Kennedy assassination, Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and
Independent Counsels.

What You Need to Tell Us When Ordering Copies

With only a few exceptions, records are not online. Although we try to provide as much help as we can through the mail, in most cases there is no substitute old-fashioned in-person research. This remains true despite advances in technology.

Requests for specific documents / files / folders:

To order copies of documents identified through on-site research, through the National Archives Catalog searches, or
through use of other descriptive resources, please indicate as much of the following
information as possible: National Archives Identifier (in the case of online catalog descriptions),
Record
Group Number,
Creating Organization, Series Title, Box Number (if
any), Folder Title (if any), Document Title (if any), and any
other information that identifies dates, a government office, a subseries
title, or a writer or contributor. In the case of Online Catalog references, you are most likely to obtain the
best search results if you can cut, paste, and/or print all of the information provided
on the catalog descriptive page for the document and/or series.

For requests based upon series descriptions only:

The results of your search might only provide a general series description
without specific box, folder, or document lists. It is still possible to
request information from the files by providing -- at the very least -- the
following information: Record Group Number, Series Title, and
the specific information described in the series arrangement statement.
The arrangement statement is often instrumental in identifying records within
a series. Providing specific information regarding your research and the
arrangement statement will improve our ability to identify appropriate materials.

Upon receipt of your request, if the information that you provide remains
inadequate to conduct a search, we will contact you with information about
how to identify materials and order copies.

Contact Us for More Information

The National Archives provides information and assistance in the use of the
textual records and the reproduction of files but is not staffed to do extensive
research for customers.